Says The Self-Described ‘Curmudgeonly Old Faggot’

A hearty belly laugh and an Evans-Manning Award to commentator Pinkjohn, an out gay clergyman who has no patience with the college kids in the “Progressivism’s Next Frontier” thread from earlier today. He writes:

These kids have too much g-ddamn privilege on their hands. As a gay old fart, I say “get a job!”

As an undergraduate in the early 80′s I studied gender and anthropology. It was fascinating and I learned a lot about the way different cultures “do” gender.

But back when I first came out, there was perhaps a greater diversity of ways to be men and women. The range of masculinity and femininity was fairly vast, from “Rosie the Riveter” types, female big rig drivers to Paul Lynde and Liberace on the male side.

Now, at the slightest deviance from the norm, these kids declare it an “identity” and want to have surgery. There are few butch lesbians anymore. They are all getting testosterone treatments and becoming men.

Never mind the condescension if you aren’t keeping up with the latest gender identity innovations. Last year I went to a major conference for the lgbt community. The over 50 crowd succeeded in carving out a space for ourselves. One common complaint was about how these undergrads and grad students looked down on those of us who paved the way for them, since we were fairly “retro” in our self-labeling, and not impressed with “gender queers.” We had little choice while they got it from a textbook.

As for lengthening acronyms, try this one on for size: POCLGBTQQGNCTSIA. (People of color, lesbian/gay/bi/trans, queer, questioning, gender nonconforming, two-spirit, intersex, asexual.)

Yes, I am a curmudgeonly old faggot. “Get off my lawn!”

Pinkjohn, did you see in the Times story where a group of these kids had jumped on their 60-year-old lesbian professor for telling them not to use the LGBTLMNOP acronym in their writing? They believed she was oppressing them. She said, persuasively, that she was just trying to help them write better English.

I could be wrong, but I think there are a lot of straight people who support gay marriage and/or other civil rights for gay folks, who nonetheless wonder where the line is to be drawn. Does supporting same-sex marriage mean that you can never criticize anything gays or transgenders do, or oppose anything they claim? There seems to be a “no enemies to the cultural left” mentality in the gay community, one that demands that anyone who wishes to do (almost) anything based on reasons of sexual desire or personal identity must be affirmed and supported. To police the margins of one’s movement is, in their eyes, to become a traitor to the movement. All movements have to deal with this, I suppose.

Twenty years ago, when I was helping cover the huge gay march on the Mall in Washington, I was really shocked by many of the things I saw. There were thousands and thousands of more or less average looking gay men and lesbians, down there marching. But there were also no small number of freaks. I think in particular about the man dressed like some sort of wood faerie, who had a large, leafy branch stuck up his butt. This guy was only the weirdest of a large number of weirdos down there that day. Also memorable: the contingent of extremely pale, obese young lesbians walking around topless.

I remember wondering at the time what I would think if I were like my gay friends, and many of the gay people on the Mall that day: basically middle-class normal, and just wanting equal treatment under the law. What would I think if America associated me and my cause with people who shoved branches up their backsides and paraded on the Mall? Or the 80-year-old leatherman walking around in nothing but leather short-shorts and rings through his nipples?

(By the way, look at the list of major demands the Washington marchers made in 1993. Notice what’s missing? Marriage rights. It was barely on the radar of the gay mainstream back then, though if you look at the full, detailed list of demands, it’s there. Still, almost nobody was talking about it back then. Andrew Sullivan’s book arguing for gay marriage, Virtually Normal, was still two years away. And today, you have people acting like the case for gay marriage is so bleeding obvious that only stone-cold bigots could disagree.)

I’ve mentioned before on this blog about a really interesting piece in The New Republic I read after the march, in which the writer, one Andrew Sullivan, praised The Washington Times for its coverage of the march. Sullivan said that TWT’s coverage had the singular virtue of being honest, because its reporters did not sugarcoat the march, and write as if the only people marching were bourgeois normals.

Anyway, I get the desire of many gay people to be accepted into the middle-class American mainstream — “virtually normal,” in Sullivan’s phrase. At some point, though, you have to accept middle-class norms, even if they’re stretched to include same-sex relationships. The kind of radical stuff those college students are into will never be middle class. I am certain that those radicals may not want to be middle class in the least, and are happy to be seen as pushing the envelope. But they can’t really act that way, and expect to be affirmed in their radicalism by the middle class mainstream (which includes, it appears, Pinkjohn, though correct me if I’m wrong). It’s childish. It reminds me of myself as a petulant teenager, wanting to dress in such a way as to tick off my dad, but then resenting him when he got ticked off by the way I dressed. It also reminds me of artists demanding an arts grant from the government to fund their projects denouncing the values of the same taxpayers giving them the handout.

64 Responses to Says The Self-Described ‘Curmudgeonly Old Faggot’

Another label, I object to is liberal and conservative Christian. it’s a 19th century political definition.

Steph,

I would say your argument is not with a particular group, but with the order of creation itself. Sex is now replaced with gender, to make gender mean whatever one “thinks” it is.

A person’s experiences may seem real, but they are still subjective. There is no evidence to prove that pre-determined inclinations always result in certain actions, that one has no control over. A comment often made by those in gay community, that they do have control over their actions. This is what Christians object too.

The APA already calls bestiality a normal sexual orientation, and there are liberals now crazy enough to start discussing whether we are too harsh on pedophilia. Check out this recent article, that quotes “experts”

I think the distinction you are drawing is a little artificial. That is like saying that defecating in the drinking supply doesn’t cause cholera, a bacteria does.

Regardless of one’s opinion on society’s attitude toward (male)* homosexual behavior, it seems odd that being associated with spreading a disease is the reason to make it more acceptable rather than an “in spite of” condition.

Sullivan states he’s conservative, he’s gay, and he’s married… Sullivan is not linking these states together in the way you have claimed, he is pointedly de-linking them.

And today, you have people acting like the case for gay marriage is so bleeding obvious that only stone-cold bigots could disagree.

That’s because gay activists have succeed in framing the issue as one of civil rights and equal protection under the law, beating the “social conservatives” who tried to frame it as a moral issue with potentially devastating consequences for society. It’s a case of P.R. beating out sound discussion and thoughtful analysis, and it reflects the idea that all truth is perceptional and personal.

LOL conservative? I think the use of the word gay already indicates a lack of social conservatism. The word gay normalizes homosexuality – and that’s not conservative.

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M_Young says: “The Sullivans of the world are more dangerous than the guys at Fulsome Street fair. etc.”

On the money. You couldn’t have said it better. And with each passing day, so-called conservatives are adopting more and more of Sullivan’s views and attitudes. Either adopting them or being less hypocritical about not being conservative, which they never were deep down anyways – it was much more of a façade.

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Public Defender wrote: “And promiscuous gay people are appropriately treated a lot more like promiscuous heterosexual couples.”

That is they are largely endorsed and have total impunity for criminal behavior such as spreading serious STDs. Men who have sex with men lead by far the spread of HIV and syphilis in society. Not to mention that they then extort billions in health care costs from the State to pay for the damage they cause in society.

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The Wet One says: “Normal is pretty important isn’t it? Too bad that, under examination, no such thing exits.”

Not really. I gave you pretty much a spot-on analogy for this: consuming food improperly stored and handled can lead to food poisoning. Food itself does not cause food poisoning– microbes do– and no one would claim it does, and we would consider someone a hopeless crank who inveighed against all restaurants and grocery stores for that reason.

Re: It seems odd that being associated with spreading a disease is the reason to make it more acceptable rather than an “in spite of” condition.

I’m not sure what you are talking about here. Sex, in general, can spread disease, but humankind is not going to give up sex any more than they will give up eating. And it isn’t gay sex that society is endorsing, it’s gay people.
It’s plain dehumanizing to reduce people to a sex act, just as it is to reduce them to a skin color or country of origin.

“it seems to me — and I say this with respect — that gay folks want to have it both ways. They want to be seen by the hetero world as just like everybody else, except also really outrageous and wild and fun and intensely sexual. Well, which is it? I think the only way to resolve the tension is for straight people to adopt a gay-culture stance towards transgressiveness — accepting leathermen/B&D, public nudity, drag queens, etc., as part of the gorgeous mosaic.”

But doesn’t this set up an unrealistic standard for gays? Since not all straights conform to bourgois normalcy at all times. Gays have drag queens and pride parade, and straights have Mardi Gras, and Halloween, and Burning Man, and strip clubs, and fraternities. Heck, the last Republican president of the United States got naked in a Yale secret society, lay in a coffin, and confessed a secret to his fellow Skull and Bones members.

Of course, most straight people understand that there is a time and a place for this sort of thing, as do most gay people.

The gay community has done a great job of reducing themselves to a sex act, nobody else needs to do it for them. The point is there is no evidence to prove that pre-determined inclinations always result in pre-determined actions, where biology is not fixed. So behaviour is a choice, and very much so in this case.

Gender studies is an academic discipline. Simone de Beauvoir said: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one”.[5] This view proposes that in gender studies, the term “gender” should be used to refer to the social and cultural constructions of masculinities and femininities, not to the state of being male or female in its entirety.[6]

In France, the support for gay marriage is slipping thanks to very vigorous debate. Instead, of letting them silence their opponents, calling them homophobic, anti-gay etc. They are choosing to engage in debate.

I know the traditional Marriage Americans have failed, either because they are not as bright as the French, or because they have not permitted that kind of debate either in the media or government.

Not only are Savia and I in agreement this week, but I would also like to take this opportunity to express full agreement with Joseph d’Hippolito. Its happened before, more often than a blue moon. I’ll see Savia and raise her: the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are 19th century constructs. “Cultural leftists” in the 19th century would have been bourgeois and aristocratic perverts.